Laurent Heiser, 6 dan from Luxembourg, tells an interesting story from the 9th WAGC. The event was held in China for the first time, and Chinese players (including future top pros like Nie Weiping and Ma Xiaochun) had won most of the previous events in Japan, so the Chinese were looking forward to crowning their champion on home soil. The Chinese player, Yu Bin (another future top pro), had an unexpected loss to Imamura in an early round, but Imamura had lost to the Korean player, so at the last round it was going to come down to a SOS tiebreak. Imamura had worked out the likely results and even if he won his last game expected to not win the tournament due to lower SOS. However, he had not counted on the young, unknown Luxembourgish 4 dan Laurent Heiser winning his final game against a higher ranked player that only Yu Bin had played, and in doing so Laurent deprived Yu Bin of one vital SOS point, meaning Yu and Imamura tied on SOS and Imamura won on head-to-head tie break! Thus began a friendship between Imamura and Laurent, who visited and studied with him in Japan several times.